Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.<1> Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".
In 1943 she joined the U.S. Naval Reserve on active duty and was assigned to work with Howard Aiken on the Mark I Calculator. At the end of the war she was separated from active duty with the Navy, remaining in the reserves, but she continued to work on the development of the Mark II and the Mark III calculators (early computers). It was while she was working on Mark II that technicians discovered a moth in a relay — a bug in the computer. Hopper pasted it into a log book (now in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution), noting it as the first actual case of a bug being found.<3><4> Erroneously, some have cited this incident as the genesis of the term bug, but the term was already in wide use.<5>
She later returned to the Navy where she worked on validation software for the programming language COBOL and its compiler. COBOL was defined by the CODASYL committee which extended her FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, the COMTRAN. However, it was her idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code (such as assembly language), which is how it was normally done at that time. It is fair to say that COBOL was based very much on her philosophy.
In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. The Navy tests for conformance to these standards led to significant convergence among the programming language dialects of the major computer vendors. In the 1980s, these tests (and their official administration) were assumed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), known today as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper
Myself I trained and started as a computer programmer back in 1971 when punch cards still dominated. In fact a revolution to me was the 96 column card and the new "mini" computers like the IBM System 3. My best programming teacher was a woman who was with Control Data. Yet in 71 I had to look for jobs under male help wanted. Once I got a foot in the door it was no problem from then on to get a job on the minis since there were a ton of small - medium businesses who were getting their first computers and needed programmers like myself to program their business applications. And it's strange that it's still somewhat of an industry that is still somewhat dominated by men. Maybe now its the geek factor.
System 3 and 96 column card.
For mass storage, the System/3 used a single-platter disk, roughly the size of a large pizza; initially each platter held 2.5 MB of data. Standard configuration for storage was one or two fixed disks, each in a separate pull-out drawer, which typically held the operating system and user-developed programs. Additionally, each fixed disc could have a removable cartridge disk attached; these typically contained the data-files associated with various applications, for example Payroll, and users frequently had a number of them. Thus the low-end systems could support a maximum of 10 MB of online storage (two fixed, 2 removable), although in practice this was very expensive and not always common.
Offline storage was available with the purchase of an external tape drive which read and wrote standard IBM tape content.
System printing was typically via line printers or bi-directional dot matrix printers. A modified selectric typewriter was often used as a console.
The System/3 came standard with a RPG II compiler, and used a version of Job Control Language called OCL.
The System/3 and successor models (System/32, System/34, System/36 and System/38, then the AS/400 and iSeries) are generally referred to as minicomputers or in IBM terminalogy "midrange systems"—in contrast to IBM's more traditional large mainframes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System/3I remember we had stacks of those pizza platter disks and how you had to squeeze to get all the info you wanted on them. I ocassionally marvel that my cell phone has more storage than stacks of those pizza platters.
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